HOW ATHENS TOOK OVER LEADERSHIP OF SPARTA AFTER THE PERSIAN WARS During the period of Greek history from the last years of the Persian Wars till the beginning of the First Peloponnesian War, the primacy of Sparta declined whileAthens was gaining increased influence in Greece. The Athenian, Thuc...

In his introductory remarks to William Baker's essay on the early "Organized Greek Games" of the classical era, one of the editors of The Western Experience, Steven Golden, writes that sports are not merely a kind of sideshow to a nation or a society but a mainstream component of that soci...

Sparta and Athens are like apples and oranges: the same but different. Both are fruit grown on trees in the case of the apples and oranges, and both are city-states in Greece in the case of Athens and Sparta. Apples and oranges have distinctly different tastes, textures and flavors. Athens and Sp...